16GB SD card

I have installed RISCOS for my RPI on a 16 GB SD card. The OS can only ‘see’ 2GB, is there an easy way to make the full 16GB available to RISCOS? I have access to a PC running windows, a PC running LINUX or my RPI running either RISCOS or Raspbian. The Linux PC has no SD card reader!

is there an easy way to make the full 16GB available to RISCOS?

No

Is there any way to do this?

Apparently the latest FAT32FS will allow you to mount FAT partitions on the SD Card. (You will probably need to create the extra partition with another OS.)

John see this thread on the Pi forum.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=22117&p=211309#p211309

Would the following work?
Insert SD card into PC running windows.
Create 8 * 2 GB fat32 partitions under Windows ( effectively making 8 discs)
Using the windows utility, copy RISCOS onto the first partition(‘disc’)
Using the latest fat32fs, mount the other partitions.

I don’t think SDFS is limited to 2Gbytes?

Right now, there are complicated technical reasons why the RISC OS SD card format is the way it is – and we’ve fixed it at 2GB because it’s a fiddly and time-consuming job making the underlying image (because it’s complicated). There are plans for a tool which can resize the image (e.g. to fill a larger card) but that tool isn’t finished yet.

RISC OS, as yet, doesn’t support partitions.

However a DOS style partition table can exist on a Filecore disk, without interfering or being interfered with.

Also RISC OS supports FAT image files.

What has been done, (which either extremely clever or horrible, I’m not sure which, but suspect both), is to have a standard DOS partition at the start of the drive and the filecore area overlapping it. This area is then marked under filecore as an image file, so it is accessible under RISC OS.

The remainder of the filecore area has a protective partition entry, so that other OSes will leave it alone.

FAT32FS is an addon that gives the ability to mount FAT partitions on USB drives. (It can only mount 1 partition per drive, but you can select.)

The latest version also suppords the internal SD card. (Though you have to use the command line at present, and you don’t get a disk on the iconbar.)

I just tried it successfully.

I needed to create a new FAT partition in the empty space on a PC. (I had to use Linux, XP didn’t allow me to do it.)

Details are here:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/1/topics/1154?page=5

I used this command.

fat32fs:mount -fp2 :16 { > null: }

Hopefully this will mean that once this system has proven itself (and a new filecore formatter that also creates a partition entry is created), the image file thing should no longer be needed and we will be able to choose our own partition arrangements. (Subject to the Filecore one being the first, as it was on my old Castle SCSI interface.)

Thought I would comment for clarity for other users:
My understanding is that the Pi, and other ARM SD boot boards require to boot of a FAT 32 formatted partition on the SD card.
Hence the franken boot situation we have, where we need a FAT32/Filecore SD split.
There is nothing stopping you from having another SD card formatted entirely filecore. I have an extra SD card formatted entirely using filecore. (I’m not on a Pi anymore though)
The Frankenboot situation is the same for linux, it’s horrible really.

Except, under Linux, my understanding is that it’s got a normal partition table – FAT32 partition mounted under Linux as /boot, then Linux ext3 or whatever partition mounted as /, and Linux swap partition.

Not the FAT32 partition, with the Filecore partition ON TOP of the FAT32 partition, and the FAT32 partition given an entry in the Filecore allocation table as a disk image.

Correct, it’s my hatred for encryption, partitions, meta discs, volume groups, pvtoc’s, san fabrics, thin partitioning with all vendors & architectures adding their own layer of special fudge sauce on the top of it all, it’s all hell designed by some evil tyrants! But hey, it pays the bills right ;-)

I was a bit naughty yesterday, a rummage through the cupboard only turned up a 256MB MMC and 1GB SD. The MMC wont work in the Pi, and the 1GB was too small for the RISC OS image, but as it was RISC OS I noticed there was hardly anything in the image. So on the Iyonix I was able to F%=OPENUP"image":EXT#F%=1024*1024*1024:CLOSE#F% and write it to the card. That allowed me to try it out, although I need to download a clean RO5 disc image before it will do anything useful.

A quick check with the first every BASIC program I typed in – Random Triangles from the BBC BASIC User Guide, showed the graphics acceleration to be working, as it was a blistering 6x faster than the Iyonix in the same mode. The desktop was showing artefacts when moving windows though.

AIUI only rectangle copy has been hardware accelerated so for!

Correct. The fact that triangle rendering is faster on the Pi than the Iyonix is more of an indication of the differing bus architecture.

Screen reads/writes on the Iyonix will be going via the PCI bus, which slows things down a lot, especially reads. The Pi has a unified memory architecture, so won’t have such bad speed penalties, and as an added bonus (compared to beagle) the video memory will be cached by the system level L2 cache.

On the subject of the corruption when dragging windows: Are you talking about bits of pointer (or bits of whatever’s underneath the pointer) being left all over the place? If so, then it sounds like you need to update to a newer boot sequence which includes the VCHIQ softload (or you need to make sure the softload is being run – it should be in the PreDesk folder).

This

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/6/topics/1094#posts-12721

and this

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/8/topics/1085#posts-12734

works also on a RPi.

Sorry, I not read all posts here. ;-)

I tried this out on a new 16Gb SanDisk extreme and after de-zipping the file it successfully dd’d from my iMac to the card. It even booted!

I’ve been running it for a few days and enjoying the faster card performance but after some benchmarking of my programs it seems as if something is dramatically slower compute-wise. Right now my guess is that the over clocking commands in my BootLoad.config/txt are being ignored.

Anybody else tried this and noticed any similar issues? Is there any progress on the expender tool mentioned above (Steve)?

my guess is that the over clocking commands in my BootLoad.config/txt are being ignored

Look at the SD card in a Windows machine, copy the ‘config.txt’ file to a new file called ‘CONFIG2.TXT’, delete the file ‘config.txt’ and rename the file ‘CONFIG2.TXT’ to CONFIG.TXT’.

Now try it again.

No luck with that Chris. In fact it’s a bit weird – the copy of config.sys my machine saw had no over clocking related lines in at all. I edited the file, tried again. No difference. Followed your suggestions again, no difference.

Although not Pi specific, assuming the same pattern is followed during boot, especially

RISC OS completely ignores whatever speed settings u-boot specifies.

http://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/5/topics/1187#posts-14226

may be of interest?

The odd part is that from RISC OS the config.txt was visible and editable with no problem but the over clocking commands had no effect. Stick the card in at the card reader on my iMac and a config.txt was visible and editable but it was not the same file – no over clocking statements in there. I edited it to add some and rebooted with no effect on speed. I then tried what Chris suggested, likewise with no effect.

It leaves me wondering just what config.txt file is getting used during boot-up and where the pi is finding it.

Welcome to the world of FAT formatted media. It is possible to see different ‘config/txt’ files on different machines due to various bugs. Make sure the file is in capitals under RISC OS.

Ok, Maybe its the Easeus partition master but:

Windows 7

I have taken the RC11 Raspberry Pi Card Image, installed it on a 32 GiB SD Card.

Used Easus partition manager to create a FAT32 partition.

dismounted the SD card and re-inserted it into the PC, and Easus and another partition manager found the FAT32 partition, and Windows Disk Manager found a ‘partition’ but couldn’t identify it.

Under RISC OS:

fat32fs:mount -fp2 :16{>null:}
results in:
“Mounting drive 16 partition 2”
“Could not open drive 16 (-11).”

obviously “fat32fs:mount -fp1 :16” mounts the boot partition.

Where am I going wrong?

Cheers.

Ther must be a command to initialize the new partition as fat32, under linux all you have to do is put the filesystem on it.